Intel, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard joined Tuesday in a broad research effort to advance cloud computing, in which the Internet is used to deliver computing services to users.

The announcement from the three tech giants isn’t the first such collaboration to involve universities and government. In October, Google and IBM kicked off a similar effort.

But Tuesday’s initiative held the promise of enormous scale, with six data centers planned on three continents and each company contributing up to 4,000 computing cores, or semiconductor brains, to the project. The three firms declined to discuss financial terms of the arrangement.

Along with Intel, Yahoo and HP, the Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany are taking part in the project and hosting centers.

“Cloud computing is critically important to the industry” as the Internet changes the way computing is done, Andrew Chien, a vice president at Intel, said on a conference call. “We believe the revolution in information technology has just begun.”

The companies said the computing centers, or “test beds,” would enable research into the necessary ingredients of cloud computing: software development, security enhancement, data-center management and hardware evolution – all challenges facing computing at such a large scale. The centers are to be operational later this year.

In cloud computing, computers and computing resources are bunched on the Internet in data centers for efficiency and applications are delivered over the network upon request as services to users.

The companies’ initiative is “nothing new,” said Ian Campbell, chief executive of Nucleus Research in Wellesley, Mass. But “it does continue to validate the concept of cloud computing” as the way of the future.

It also smartly harnesses the efforts of academics to solve technological problems, he said. One goal of the project will in fact be to enable academics to create applications that will run in such large computing environments, said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo research. It is a collaborative partnership, he said.

The centers are to be largely based on Intel chips and HP hardware, according to a press release.

“I think it’s related to what IBM and Google are doing,” said Frank Gillett, principal analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. They want to attract developers to write cloud computing software for HP hardware, Intel chips and the Yahoo platform, he said.

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